Page 76 of Wretched Thorns

The guilt was the part I turned over. Anger I understood; anger was the easy one, the clean one, the one I was running on myself. But guilt came down all three threads at once, onyx and gold and silver braided into one low note of it, and guilt is the feeling of a debt you cannot pay. They knew something I did not. The name had a weight for them it did not yet have for me, and the weight was personal, and it had to do with why a man in an expensive suit would walk into a swamp to look at a bound woman’s bruises and start counting. I did not have the whole picture here. I had just enough to know that whatever Marcus had stumbled into when he took me was bigger than Marcus, and the three men on the other end of my bond had been carrying its name around for longer than they had been carrying mine.

The shorter, cringe dude shifted his weight beside my chair. He hadn’t heard anything. He didn’t know anything was happening. He was just bored, waiting for whatever was being decided in the hallway to be decided.

The threads went still again. Awake, but still. They were listening for what came next.

***

I don’t know what was said outside. I know it took a long time.

I know the cringe dudes didn’t speak to each other and didn’t speak to me. Whatever they had been told before they came into this room, they had been told well enough that they were not going to ask anything in front of a woman who looked like she was paying attention.

I let my eyes go heavy. I let my mouth slacken at one corner. I let myself look like a woman who didn’t know what any of this was.

When the door opened again, only Marcus came back through it. The man in the suit was gone. The wolf was gone. Whatever had been said in the hallway had been said for two men, and only one of those men was returning to this room.

Marcus’s mouth was white at the corners. His company face was gone. He looked at me the way men looked at things they couldn’t have anymore.

“Get up,” he said.

The cringe dudes loosened the restraints without looking at him. The shorter one took his cruelty back on the way out, pulled the leather too fast and let the buckle catch the inside of my wrist on the way past.

Marcus walked me back down the hall himself this time. His hand at my elbow. His fingers tighter than fingers were supposed to be on a woman’s elbow. His breath fast in his chest in a register I hadn’t heard from him in three years.

Whatever had gone down outside, Marcus wasn’t happy about it. Men like Marcus don’t handle disappointment well.

He walked me into a different room than the one I had been in.

Smaller. Cypress wood floor again. A cot. A candle. Nothing else.

Marcus shoved me down onto the cot harder than he needed to. He stood over me the way men stood over women they were about to take something from. He leaned down.

The shadows came up off the floor without me asking them.

They didn’t reach for him. They made a quiet wall between his face and my throat.

Marcus stopped six inches from my throat and couldn’t move closer.

His face went white.

“You little bitch,” he said.

It was the first time he had ever called me that out loud. In three years he had called me a hundred things. He hadn’t called me that one. That was the word he had been saving.

I smiled.

He saw the smile. He saw what it meant. I never saw his fist coming. I should have, but I didn’t.

The shadows started to come up off the floor.

He hit me again before they could finish.

It wasn’t a slap. It was a closed-fist hit to the side of my mouth, and he had planned it before he walked into the room. The inside of my cheek opened on my own teeth. The back of my head bounced off the cot. The room went sideways.

When I came back, he had his mouth on my throat.

His hand was on the dip of my collarbone where the bruise was, and the cold was already pulling out of my skin through the place his hand had landed, his other hand was tearing at my clothing. The bond was screaming, threads writhing in agony. My heart was breaking but I hadn’t even reclaimed my breath yet. I tasted blood on my tongue, and somewhere in the midst of all of that, a voice that wasn’t mine rang out like a bell and said one thing.

GET UP.